William Whiston and the Deluge

The years 1680 and 1682 were years of unusually bright
comets. Many pamphlets were printed, especially in Germany, on the imminent
end of the world; at the very least, great catastrophes were expected.
There was nothing new in such prognostications. In earlier centuries and
also earlier in the seventeenth century, comets were regarded with awe
and every possible evil effect was ascribed to them. Thus a scholarly
author, David Herlicius, published in 1619 a discourse on a comet that
had appeared shortly before, in 1618, and enumerated the calamities that
this comet, and comets in general, bring with them or presage:

Desiccation of the crops and barrenness, pestilence,
great stormy winds, great inundations, shipwrecks, defeat of armies
or destruction of kingdoms . . . decease of great potentates and scholars,
schisms and rifts in religion, etc. The portents of comets are threefoldin
part natural, in part political, and in part theological.(1)

David Herlicius also quoted Cicero: From the remotest
remembrance of antiquity it is known that comets have always presaged
disasters. (2)

The fear and even horror caused by the comet of 1680
was just beginning to calm down when in 1682 another great comet appeared.

Edmund Halley was twenty-six years old when this comet
of 1682 appeared. He had experience in astronomical observations and calculations,
having spent time on the island of St. Helena, cataloguing there 341 southern
stars; he had observed the transit of Mercury, and made pendulum observations.
Now he calculated the orbit of the comet of 1682, and predicted its return
in 1759. Actually, the periodicity of comets was not first discovered
by Halley. The ancient authors knew that comets have their time of revolution.
Seneca wrote in his treatise De Cometisin some respects still
the most advanced discussion of this subjectthat the Chaldeans counted
the comets among the planets.(3)
A comet with a periodicity of about 70 years was known to the rabbis.(4)

Nevertheless, only little aware of the works of the
ancients, the modern world acclaimed Halley to be the discoverer of the
periodicity of comets; however, this acclaim came only after his prognostication
realized itself. The comet of 1682, or Halleys comet, returned in
1759. It came somewhat retarded on account of its passage near the planets
Jupiter and Saturn. This delay had been calculated, though not quite accurately,
by Halley. On the grave of Halley these words are engraved: Under
this marble peacefully rests . . . Edmundus Halleius, LL.D., unquestionably
the greatest astronomer of his age.

But when Halley offered his theory of the periodicity
of comets, and of the return of the observed comet after seventy-five
years, this theory was not received immediately with enthusiasm. Yet in
the mind of a contemporary mathematician the idea of a periodic return
of comets was the beginning of a broadly-developed theory of the origin
of the world and of the nature of the deluge.

William Whiston, born in 1667, published in 1696 his
New Theory of the Earth. In this book he claimed that the comet
of 1682 was of a 575&half year periodicity; that the same comet had appeared
in February of 1106, in +531 in the consulate of Lampadius and Orestes,
and in September of -44, the year of Caesars assassination.(5)
Whiston further asserted that this comet had met the earth in -2346, and
caused the Deluge.(6)

Whiston found in classical literature references to
the change in inclination of the terrestrial axis and, ascribing it to
a displacement of the poles by the comet of the Deluge, concluded that
before this catastrophe the planes of daily rotation and yearly revolution
coincided and that, therefore, there had been no seasons. He also found
references to a year consisting of 360 days only, and although the Greek
authors referred the change to the time of Atreus and Thyestes, and the
Romans to the time of Numa, ca. -700, Whiston ascribed these changes to
the effect of the Earths encounter with the comet of the Deluge.
Whiston thought that the Earth itself was once a comet.

Whiston was chosen by Isaac Newton to take over his
chair of mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge when Newton, after
many years, retired in order to dedicate himself to the duties of the
president of the Royal Society. Whiston, like Newton, was a Unitarian.
He was also close to being a fundamentalist. He was certain that only
one global catastrophe was described in the Scripturethat of the
Deluge. Of the phenomenon described in the book of Joshua, he wrote: The
Scripture did not intend to teach men philosophy, or accomodate itself
to the true and Pythagoric system of the world.

It is difficult to say what caused Newton, who selected
Whiston as his successor, to oppose Whistons election to the membership
of the Royal Society. We have another similar instance a century later,
when Sir Humphry Davy, the mentor of Michael Faraday, conducted a strenuous
campaign to keep Faraday from being admitted to the Royal Society, of
which Davy was president.

But the very idea of a periodicity of comets, gleaned
by Whiston from Halley, was not yet accepted. In 1744 a German author
wrote: It is well known that Whiston and others like him who wish
to predict the comings and goings of comets, deceive themselves, and have
become an object of ridicule by the entire world. (7)

Still later Whiston was ridiculed by Georges Cuvier,
himself a proponent of a catastrophist theory:

Whiston fancied that the earth was created from the
atmosphere of one comet, and that it was deluged by the tail of another.
The heat which remained from its first origin, in his opinion, excited
the whole antediluvian population, men and animals, to sin, for which
they were all drowned in the deluge, excepting the fish, whose passions
were apparently less violent.

Quaestiones
Naturales IV.1. The same opinion was ascribed to Hippocrates.

In the second
century of this era, Rabbi Joshua said There is a star which
appears every 70 years and misleads the captains of boats. It
has been suggested that this statement is a reference to Halleys
comet. (W. M. Feldman, Rabbinical Mathematics and Astronomy (New
York, 1931), pp. 11, 216.

[The
575&half year periodicity of the comet of 1682, and its previous returns
beginning in -44, were first proposed by Halley and accepted by Newton
(Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica third ed., 1726,
Book III, Proposition XLI, Problem XXI).]

The Cause
of the Deluge Demonstrated, being an Appendix to the 2nd edition of
the New Theory of the Earth (London, 1708). Whiston changed
the date calculated by the earlier cometographers so as to have a
multiple of 575½ years. David Rockenbach, Seth Calvisius, and Christopher
Helvicus had fixed the date at -2292, and Henricus Eckstormius and
David Herlicius at -2312.